From Anomala Soundscapes comes two stellar, highly limited edition vinyl LPs, illuminating Italy’s rich contemporary context of experimental ambient and electroacoustic music: Andrea Marutti & Carlo Giordani’s "Impressioni Organizzate di Ansie Liquide" and Maath’s "Vaco”. Each exploring notions of environment in remarkably distinct ways, both are astounding gems, marked by rare artistry, microscopic detail, and sprawling, immersive senses of space.

Since its launch roughly five years ago, the Rome based imprint, Anomala Soundscapes, has quietly mined Italy’s rich context of experimental electronic and electroacoustic music, focusing their energies toward the densities of meaning and possibility activated by these practices and territories of sound, via releases by artists like Mark Schaub, Daniele Pecorelli, and Rumore Austero. The label’s latest, Andrea Marutti & Carlo Giordani’s "Impressioni Organizzate di Ansie Liquide" and Maath’s "Vaco” push this modus operandi toward new heights. Each blurring the boundaries between ambient music, environmental sound, and electroacoustic practice in brilliantly engaging ways, these two are sure to etch Anomala Soundscapes’ activities on our consciousness for some time to come.

Andrea Marutti & Carlo Giordani - "Impressioni Organizzate di Ansie Liquide"

Andrea Marutti and Carlo Giordani are both longstanding figures on the Italian experimental music scene, Marutti working both under his own name and in projects like Amon and Never Known within the fields of electroacoustic, ambient, and dark ambient music, while Giordani - an electronic engineer with a background in geophysics - has developed a body of work centred around the Earth as the basis of sound research, culminating as field recordings reworked into soundscapes and complex textures.

Building on 15 years of friendship, and nearly a decade working together, “Impressioni organizzate di ansie liquide” (Organized Impressions of Liquid Anxieties) is Marutti and Carlo Giordani’s collaborative debut full length release, originally issued on CD by Silentes / St.an.da. in 2020, with Anomala Soundscapes’ new edition being its first pressing on vinyl.

The origins of the album date to 2011, when Andrea Marutti was asked by the filmmaker and cultural agitator, Massimo Indellicati, to compose soundtracks for a series of experimental short films “Aquology - Oceano interiore”, centred around aquatic and science fiction themes. Intent on intervening with his own practice in electronics and synthesis, he asked field recordist, engineer, and software designer, Carlo Giordani, to come on board.

While the film project was only realized in small fragments, Marutti and Giordani’s creative relationship bore fruit, bringing them together regularly over the subsequent years, each pushing and expanding the other’s sound practice into new territories. Melding their distinct sensibilities into a single, palpable force, “Impressioni organizzate di ansie liquide” is the result of an enduring process of reworking material produced by their collaborations between December 2013 and January 2020.

Resting at the junctures of noise, ambient music, and auditory research, "Impressioni Organizzate di Ansie Liquide" is a sonic gesture that shifts perception; where the organic transforms into the otherworldly and the synthetic bubbles with life. The collision of two highly individualized creative practices, built from a vast palette of sonority across its breadth, the locations of source and the intervening hand shift in and out of focus, gathering as an expanse of ambience and event that gives the impression of being guided by chance occurrences and responses of its own making.

Amplifying the incidental into the mystical and metaphysical, “Impressioni Organizzate di Ansie Liquide" seems to embark upon a challenge to how we locate the meaning of music and art. Unified by the thematic vision of water that first brought Marutti and Giordani together, the album culminates as a brilliant series of evolving, abstract images, alluding to the embryonic fluids that give way to life. Drifting long tones, buzzing electronics, and woven textures of ambiguous sound, rumble and dance between the foreground and distance, penetrated by punctuations drawn intermittently from Marutti’s synths and Giordani’s deft snapshots of the world.

Brilliant and strikingly beautiful amongst its casts of darkness and tension, “Impressioni Organizzate di Ansie Liquide” is an immersive, languid realm, filled with elegant, poetic beauty.

Maath - "Vaco"

Active on the scene for more than two decades, Maath is the moniker of Marco Ramassotto, who briefly came to note during the early 2000s as a member of the ritualistic, musical excursions of Biasthon, as well as working under the pseudonyms Mark Schaub and Daniele Pecorelli, each taking on its own distinct sensibility. Despite Maath’s many years of activity, Ramassotto has only produced a tiny number of releases under that guise, "Vaco”, issued by his own Anomala Soundscapes imprint, being the most recent.

Heavily centred around the practice of field recording, Maath’s "Vaco" exists in the nebulous zone between soundscape, and ambient and electroacoustic music. Constructed to be deliberately fragmentary - proving the sense of wandering without destination, seeking sensations, unexpected events, and psychic shifts - the album’s two sides meticulously weave a sense of alienation from a sprawling palette of microscopically detailed environmental sounds, played against passages guided by bass guitar and sparse instrumentation, the collective result of which is a deeply engrossing sense of tense restlessness, cast within an arching sense of uncanny calm.

Often mysterious to the extent of an intervening creative hand, "Vaco" is particularly noteworthy for the degree to which it allows its material elements space and the ability to speak for themselves. A substantial amount of both of the album’s sides - each feeling fairly distinct from the other - feature long periods where only environmental recordings seem to have been used. This is especially the case with the second side, pseudo forward by the constant buzz of insect sounds, only occasionally heightened and pushed toward new dimensions by subtle, instrumental intervention. In contrast, on the first side, Maath slightly inverts this dynamic, allowing the piece to be guided by the low rumble of long tones and a more forward sense of harmonic interplay, with a similar palette of insectile ambience producing a sense of chance and sonorous texture.

Adding a particularly interesting dimension, "Vaco" was conceived as something of a total object, with its graphic / cover elements - featuring signs reproducing the five Platonic solids symbolising the alchemical elements Fire, Earth, Water, Air and Sky - offering certain access to the intentions and meanings of the sounds, and Ramassotto’s desire for a listening experience that might establish a connection between music, esotericism, natural phenomena and symbolism.